page_title: Christian Science
section_title: View of Mark Twain
hierarchical_section_title: Christian Science / Growth / View of Mark Twain
caption_attribution_description: Mark Twain photo portrait. One of a series of photographs taken by A.F. Bradley for the purpose, arranged by George Wharton James, of helping California poet laureate Ina Coolbrith after she lost her home in the fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In his New York City studio, Bradley placed Twain on a revolving platform to make the capture of different lighting "looks" easier on the subject. The portraits were signed by Twain and sold for Coolbrith's benefit. Twain said four of the series were the finest images ever taken of him. http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/publications/siycfall_05.pdf http://www.twainquotes.com/Bradley/bradley.html
context_page_description: Christian Science is a set of beliefs associated with members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Adherents are commonly known as Christian Scientists or students of Christian Science, and the church is sometimes informally known as the Christian Science church. It originated in 19th-century New England with Mary Baker Eddy, who argued in her 1875 book Science and Health that sickness can be healed by prayer. The book became Christian Science's central text, along with the Bible, and by 2001 had sold over nine million copies.
  Eddy and 26 followers were granted a charter in 1879 to found the Church of Christ, Scientist, and in 1894 the Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was built in Boston, Massachusetts. Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in the United States, with nearly 270,000 members there by 1936, a figure that had declined by 1990 to just over 100,000, and by 2009 reportedly to under 50,000. The church publishes a newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, which won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, and runs Reading Rooms around the world.
context_section_description: Mark Twain was a prominent contemporaneous critic of Eddy's. His first article about Christian Science was published in Cosmopolitan in October 1899. Another three appeared in 1902–1903 in North American Review, then a book, Christian Science (1907). He also wrote "The Secret History of Eddypus, the World Empire" (1901–1902), in which Christian Science replaces Christianity and Eddy becomes the Pope.
  Twain described Eddy as "[g]rasping, sordid, penurious, famishing for everything she sees—money, power, glory—vain, untruthful, jealous, despotic, arrogant, insolent, pitiless where thinkers and hypnotists are concerned, illiterate, shallow, incapable of reasoning outside of commercial lines, immeasurably selfish."
  Science and Health he called "strange and frantic and incomprehensible and uninterpretable," and argued that Eddy had not written it herself. "There is nothing in Christian Science that is not explicable," he wrote, "for God is one, Time is one, Individuality is one, and may be one of a series, one of many, as an individual man, individual horse; whereas God is one, not one of a series, but one alone and without an equal." Eddy apart, Twain felt ambivalent toward mind-cure, arguing that "the thing back of it is wholly gracious and beautiful." His daughter Clara Clemens became a Christian Scientist and wrote a book about it, Awake to a Perfect Day (1956).
  Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's biographer quotes Twain as also saying this about Mary Bakery Eddy: "Mark Twain remarked, “Christian Science is humanity’s boon. Mother Eddy deserves a place in the Trinity as much as any member of it. She has organized and made available a healing principle that for two thousand years has never been employed, except as the merest guesswork. She is the benefactor of the age.” — Mark Twain, A Biography, by Albert B. Paine, Vol. III, p. 1271."104.35.252.1 (talk) 23:20, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
caption: Mark Twain (1835–1910) in 1909
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